Oznog said:
Styx said:
DO NOT USE GIF!!!!
GIF is a propietory format. PNG is th eopen-source equiv.
On the practical side, I've never had trouble creating or opening a GIF. So, how does this matter? Can Linux not open GIFs or what?
The problem is software patents.
For a piece of software to utilse the decompession of a GIF file (as well as encoding) it needs to pay a licence to whoever holds that software patent.
This is only an issue for countries that have software patents (US,Japan... and almost EU). For countries that do not they do not have to pay a licence fee.
A new image software comes onto the market, it has to compete with the big player Photoshop, it wants to encode in GIF so it has to pay the licence, that cost get passed onto the end user.
IF it doesnt pay the licence and includes GIF support IF that software is sold in a country that has software patents they are history.
Thus it is extreamly hard for a new product to enter the market.
Now there is GIMP, it has GIF coding/decoding BUT if you are in the US you cannot download the source/binaries with GIF-support (since everything is a plugin for GIMP), to protect themselfs there is a european server (for use eurotrash to d/l gimp as well) but it hosts the GIF-plugin.
This bypasses the patent since the original software (GIMP) did not ship in the US with GIF support.
To your question YES linux does support GIF (it supports every image format there is (alot more then Windows can)). BUT the point is the likes of Redhat/SuSe/... cannot ship programs in their distro that violate patents (MP3 is another one) since they need to ensure that they cannot be targeted by legel procedings. All the distro's support GIF/JPG/MP3/MPEG but just not out of the box (if purchased or d/l in the US)
All I am saying is PNG is a far superior fileformat and it is a dropin replacement for GIF (does all that GIF does but better and more) and if support grows for it then its acceptance will grow relegating GIF to the histroy books and thus licence fees for that patent are no longer needed thus cheaper software